Government shutdown: Disabled veteran's disability checks may stop, but not his admiration for Elmo Zumwalt Jr.

Fredric Alan Maxwell, a Northeast Portland author, served six years as a quartermaster in the U.S. Navy in the 1970s.

Although he still writes for his alumni magazine and other publications, Maxwell, 59, has a heart defect and survives on his $1,038-a-month disability pension check from the US Department of Veterans Affairs. Maxwell is one of 3.8 million veterans who are in danger of not receiving their next check due to the U.S. government shutdown.

The check is barely enough to live on, Maxwell said Thursday, and not nearly enough to pay for an airline ticket back to the

. Maxwell was invited to attend by Lt. Col. James G. Zumwalt, the son of Admiral Elmo R. "Bud" Zumwalt Jr.

Elmo Zumwalt, a progressive chief of Naval Operations during the Vietnam War, was also known for improving the lives of enlisted men and women, and especially enlisted African American sailors.

Zumwalt died in 2000, but his name will live on starting with the Oct. 19 christening of his namesake vessel, the U.S. Navy's newest, and largest ever built, guided missile destroyer.

For Maxwell, serving on Zumwalt’s Chief of Naval Operations Barge was his most memorable port of call, he said.

The USS Zumwalt, clockwise from upper left, under construction at the Bath Iron works; the deckhouse before being added to the ship; and two artists renderings of the ship in action and at sea.

Zumwalt’s “barge” was in fact a 63.5- foot yacht, and Maxwell was in charge of navigating the craft along the Potomac and Anacostia rivers in Washington, D.C. The ship was moored in the Washington Navy Yard a few slips away from the presidential yacht, the USS Sequoia.

“I was 19 when I get the job ... I was shocked," he said -- not only because of his tender age, but also because he was, he admits, a terrible navigator.

He was assigned to the barge while taking his final quartermaster exam in San Diego. During the simulated piloting of an aircraft carrier, “I proceeded to chart us the absolute wrong way and enter restricted Mexican waters, creating an international incident,” he said in a tribute he wrote about Zumwalt. “I then reversed course and soon ran us aground on North Island.”

When he arrived in D.C., Maxwell told the Navy he was there to work on the admiral’s barge, and within minutes he was chipping paint from the hull of an actual barge.

When things got sorted out, he spent two years on Zumwalt's barge, first serving for a year until Zumwalt's retirement in 1974 and then for Adm. James L. Holloway.

He succeeded as a navigator aboard the barge, he joked, “because we were never out of sight of land.”

Just months into his service on the barge, Maxwell’s mother died. Zumwalt, who lost his mother when he was 18, was sympathetic.

“He said, ‘Don’t pay any attention to Navy regulations, take all the time you need to deal with this,’” Maxwell said. “He was the best boss I ever had; he made me feel like I had worth -- I would have followed him anywhere.”

He and Zumwalt kept in touch over the years. In 1986, when Maxwell was arrested and spent eight days in jail for studying after hours in the Library of Congress, part of a protest over a reduction in nighttime hours at the library, Zumwalt sent him a note that said, "More power to you," Maxwell said.

“Every couple of years we’d exchange something, even if it was just a Christmas card,’’ Maxwell said.

In January 1991, Zumwalt wrote Maxwell a recommendation for his application to the famed Iowa Writer’s Workshop. Although he wasn't accepted, Maxwell in 2002 went on to write an unauthorized biography of Steve Ballmer, the C.E.O. of Microsoft entitled

His last book, an unauthorized biography of Steve Jobs, never made it to print, Maxwell said, and the publisher asked him to refund the advance. He’s working on two more books, but the process has been slowed by his ill health.

On the bright side, Maxwell is donating his signed photograph of Zumwalt to the Navy. It will become part of a "sailor of the month" award aboard the

Despite a looming chance that his disability checks might stop, Maxwell has no animosity toward the Navy. It put him through college and is now paying for his medical care, he said. And he can live with missing out on next Saturday’s christening.

“I’m hoping it gets assigned to the Pacific Fleet and makes it Portland for fleet week next summer,’’ he said. “To be on the deck of the Zumwalt would be such an experience.”